6 Memes from A Voice for Men, and What They Really Mean

A Voice for Men seems to have gone a bit meme-crazy. The site’s official Pinterest page, which seems to be fairly new, is loaded up with 374 memes on such subjects as Sexual Politics, False Accusations, MGTOW, and of course Feminism.

It’s not clear how many of these memes were created by the AVFM “Meme Team” and how many were simply grabbed from the internet. But a number of the memes are emblazoned with the A Voice for Men name and/or logo, so I think it’s fair to say that these, at least, are “official” AVFM memes.

Going through these memes, one thing about them becomes clear very quickly: most of them seem to convey messages that are often considerably different than those their creators seem to have intended.

So here, without further ado, here are 6 AVFM memes and what they really mean.

1) MEN SOLVE PROBLEMS

What this meme purports to say: These two variations on the same meme might (charitably) be interpreted to mean that we should honor the historical achievements of men.

What this meme really says: Men are superior to women. Suck it up, dumb bitches!

2) TODAY HE WOULD BE CALLED A RAPIST

What this meme purports to say: Feminist ideologues have so corrupted the notion of rape that is has become ridiculous.

What this meme really says: We basically don’t understand what consent is. Why shouldn’t a dude be allowed to just go kiss a woman on the mouth without her permission?

3) THANKS FOR NOTHING, FEMINISM!

What this meme purports to say: Feminism has conned women into giving up the joys of motherhood for the sorrows of wage labor

What this meme really says: We believe in a magical prefeminist fairyland in which all mothers were young, beautiful middle class women whose husbands could afford to support them while they raised children. There was no such thing as the working class, or women working in factory jobs, before feminism. Also, we basically think women shouldn’t have jobs, though we get mad at housewives for “leeching” off their husbands all the time, too.

4) COMMITTED TO FAIRNESS IN FAMILY COURTS

What this meme purports to say: Judges should not automatically assume that mothers will make better parents than fathers.

What this meme really says: We hate women, and love to laugh at them, and think that if any woman anywhere behaves badly it reflects poorly on all women due to the transitive property of women being terrible bitches.

5) BAN BOSSY?

What this meme purports to say: We oppose the #BanBossy campaign, for some reason.

What this meme really says: We hate women with any power in the world. We also hate little girls.

6) FEMINISTS WON’T STOP UNTIL WE MAKE THEM

What these related memes purport to say: These two memes suggest that feminism is a vicious, violent ideology that must be strongly opposed.

What these memes really say: We like to portray ourselves as victims of feminist violence, even if we have to imagine it, because that gives us a justification to indulge in wild fantasies of violent “retribution” that for some reason involve fists being shoved into women’s orifices.

COMING SOON: An arbitrary number of A Voice for Men memes that make no fucking sense.

EDIT: Proofreading fixes.

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About David Futrelle

I run the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, which tracks (and mocks) online misogyny.
My writing has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Salon, Time.com, the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review and Money magazine.
I like cats.

About the whole “wimmin never invented anything!” part; Hedy Lamarr invented wifi and bluetooth. Ada Lovelace is considered to be the worlds first computer programmer.

Eh, to be pedantic, Hedy Lamar and George Antheil invented “an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping,[3] which paved the way for today’s wireless communications[4][5] and which, upon its invention in 1941, was deemed so vital to national defense that government officials would not allow publication of its details.[6]”

So yes, she helped invent something that proved essential for modern communications. No, she didn’t invent modern communications.

@Unimaginative

From my *extremely fuzzy* memories of elementary school history lessons, pre-european north americans didn’t have wheels.

That’s right, Native Americans didn’t have the wheel, whether North or South. For whatever reason, you can find a larger number of permanent structures south of the Rio Grande than north of it, but the lack of wheels didn’t seem to slow any of them down much.

Well, the Aztecs had the wheel, but they only used it for toys. So they knew how it worked, they just didn’t find it very useful. The way I heard, the North Americans and Mesoamericans had no pack animals so there wasn’t much use for the wheel, and the Incas had the llama, but they lived in the mountains where wheeled vehicles would be dangerous and impractical.

As Katz said, the Meso/South Americans had wheels, but they didn’t see a practical use for them. Given the terrain, and the lack of draft animals stronger than humans, there wasn’t much advantage to using them. Paved roads might have made the use of dogs to pull (as with the use of dogs and sleds in the arctic), but in the middle of the continent the jungles would have made that level of total redesign of infrastructure far more costly then the nominal benefits.

Given what they did without the wheel, it’s hard to say it was (as a means of transport, what it did for pottery/clothmaking is something altogether different) needed; though a Chinese style wheelbarrow could have been useful on narrow tracks, without having to invest in making/maintaining roads). But even in Europe the idea for wheelbarrows doesn’t show up until the 12/13th centuries, so it’s not as if even that was “backwards”.

On the “A Man Invented the Wheel” thing, first, name the guy or it didn’t happen. Could just as well have been a woman who invented the wheel, and fire too. I can just see the meeting in the cave right now:

WOMAN WHO INVENTED WHEEL: I invented this round thing that rolls and you can use to to move heavy loads quickly.
RANDOM CAVE PATRIARCH: Hey, I know how we can use your silly little wheel thing! We can strap people we hate to one of those and break their arms and legs!
WOMAN WHO INVENTED WHEEL: …
WOMAN WHO INVENTED FIRE: Well, I discovered this thing I call “fire,” see how it lights up the cave and makes you feel warm? it also changes food so it tastes a lot better!
RANDOM CAVE PATRIARCH: Hey, I know how we can use your silly little fire thing! We can tie people who have different religious beliefs than us to a stake and use the fire to cook them!
WOMAN WHO INVENTED FIRE: …
RANDOM CAVE PATRIARCH: Well, if there aren’t any more cute little discoveries by the little ladies to discuss, let’s get down to the serious business of planning our war with the next cave over. There’s a lot of debate over what proportion of raping, looting, and pillaging is just right…

Re: roses–yeah, it depends a lot on the variety of rose and how well-suited that rose is to the environment. (Some are more disease-prone than others even in an environment they’re well-suited to.) A Lady Banks rose wouldn’t do well where I live–winters are too cold–but put it in Tombstone, AZ, and it gets huge. I found a rose growing wild and thriving in a shrubby area in Downeast Maine, and it is doing well. (I think it’s the Blush Hip cultivar.)

Even if the rose plant is doing well, that doesn’t mean the Japanese beetles won’t come and eat your flowers–they like rose petals even better than rose leaves, it seems. I also get a lot of sawfly larvae chewing on the leaves. The sawfly larvae don’t seem to like Rugosas much, though–I tried moving some to a Rugosa and they were gone the next day.

I like Old Garden Roses. At least in my climate, they do a lot better than the ubiquitous Hybrid Teas–plus scentless roses just aren’t that exciting for me. I got half a dozen old garden roses this fall. Orpheline de Juillet is probably the one I’m most excited about.